It occurs to me that, if I am to go to the bother of seeing a midnight movie premiere, I ought to at least have the common decency to get my review up before release-day proper has begun. I would try to defend myself by pointing out the incredible lack of sleep I was dealing with, but if I’m being honest, well-rested Chris would probably not have written his review of Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit, Part One of Many yet either.

So, let’s see. Was it good? It was, but at the same time… here’s the thing. One of the great strengths of the Lord of the Rings trilogy in cinematic form was that it pared Tolkien down to manageable levels. Because not everyone wants to watch dwarves dance around a kitchen making fun of their host to song and dance collectively written on the spot, is why. And so I want to grouse and complain that some degree of editing should have occurred, yet I really cannot do so in good conscience, because it’s fair to say that there are 13 potentially identical characters out of the 15 that are central to the plot, and Jackson has avoided that trap pretty neatly. And I doubt he could have without paying careful attention to every beat that Tolkien provided. Plus, the small hints of what was going on that Bilbo could not see (that will certainly provide a great deal of meat in future movies) were absolutely worth adding. So, in summation, this trilogy will be way too long and way too Tolkieny, but Jackson has made a compelling case for why he did it this way, and I cannot ask for more. (If I had not enjoyed myself, I could, but, yeah. Good movie. With internal-to-this-entry character growth in multiple places, even! But the rock fight was kind of dumb.)

I would be remiss, at this point, to not mention that this is a kid-movie. It’s less obviously so than many, but, y’know, kid-book, kid-movie. That is how the formula works. So don’t be surprised by your memory that it is a classic instead of a kid-book. I mean, it’s both, but you’ll only accidentally forget the one. ….and then there’s the technology.

So, the 3D? Quite good. The IMAX? Always dandy. 48 frames per second, which is the shiny new tech introduced by this movie? I believe that it was successful. The image was hyper-real, and I have no idea if this is what people want in the theater, but there’s no question now that it can be done. The biggest problem was with speed; several action shots seemed to be on a slight fast-forward, like when you turn too fast and the world lurches just a little bit. Which is to say, I’m pretty sure The Hobbit will be looked upon as a really clumsy implementation of 48fps in a few years, but for ground-breaking, you really could not request a better representative. (However, if that’s just how it will always work, then I kind of expect the experiment to fail.)